Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?
If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.
There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...
If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products.
Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs.
The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.
"Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2].
"Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment.
"Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period.
"Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
"This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC.
The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share.
[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...
[4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-nat...
[5] https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6...
[6] https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820
[7] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese...
[8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage
[9] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-p...
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_sup...
This is the official US justification. This does not mean that is also true.
The Huawei sanctions happened immediately after Huawei had shown their next generation CPU for smartphones, which was better than the next generation CPU shown by Qualcomm, and also immediately after market surveys announced that Huawei will become in a few months the world leader in the smartphone market, in front of Samsung.
When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation. The beneficiaries have been mainly Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The US sanctions were exactly what they needed, the only thing that could stop their competition.
The accusation of dealing with Iran and the blackmailing of Huawei by arresting the daughter of the CEO in Canada, are probably based on true facts, but they have probably been known for many years and they have only been exposed at that time in order to legally justify the sanctions, but due to the timing and consequences of the sanctions it is completely implausible than the old deals with Iran were their real motivation. After all, USA has also made deals with Iran, when they had the interest to do this, and they have not sanctioned themselves in such a way that would affect world economy in unrelated markets. When USA forces citizens of other countries to lose money by buying more expensive smartphones, because there is lower competition, how exactly does this hurt Iran?
The sanctions against the makers of memory devices did not have any credible "national security" motivation, despite the official claims.
> "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data
I am too lazy to search now for quotations, but some time before the announcement of the US sanctions there were published prognoses for the future market share of YTMC, which was projected to grow very fast, after they had announced a new generation of more dense SSDs, which they were willing to sell at lower prices, to get market share. The fact that Apple has stopped their plans to use YTMC as supplier, a short time before the announcement of the sanctions, does not prove anything, except that the Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome.
> "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution.
I agree with what you said about the present causes of the memory price increases. However, that has nothing to do with what I have said, which did not contain any misattribution.
What I have said is that if an increased competition on the memory market would not have been prevented by the US government, today we would have had more vendors and more diverse vendors on this market. In such a market, a deal like that of Altman and the other deals for exclusive contracts with the memory vendors would have had a much less impact. So great price increases would not have happened, because the other vendors would have been eager to step in and increase their market share. The memory market would have been much more stable. Now, in markets with 2, 3 or at most 4 vendors that matter, just a few exclusive contracts are enough to destabilize the market.
tl;dr: "Who benefits is what matters, not the official explanation" is how you prove anything you want. Boeing benefits when Airbus has problems, that doesn't mean Boeing sabotaged them. And even on its own terms: Qualcomm collected royalties from Huawei on every handset sold (per their 2018 licensing deal), so Qualcomm had direct financial incentive for Huawei to sell more phones, not fewer. The "cui bono" doesn't even bono the right cui.
On "cui bono" as proof of motive:
"When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation" is a general-purpose conspiracy epistemology that can prove anything. Boeing benefits when Airbus has production problems, that doesn't mean Boeing sabotaged Airbus. Cui bono is a reason to investigate, not a reason to conclude.
But even on your own terms, the timeline doesn't work. You say the Huawei sanctions happened "immediately after" Huawei showed their next-gen CPU. The Kirin 980 was announced at IFA in August 2018 [1]. The Entity List designation came in May 2019, nine months later [2]. In the semiconductor industry, nine months is not "immediately after." The Snapdragon 855, which benchmarked significantly faster than the Kirin 980 in CPU and GPU, shipped in December 2018 [3]. If Qualcomm needed government protection from an inferior chip that launched earlier, that's not a very compelling story about competitive threat.
You're right that Huawei was on track to overtake Samsung in smartphone shipments. They hit #2 globally in 2019 [4]. But Huawei's strength was in price-competitive handsets in emerging markets, not in chip design threatening Qualcomm's licensing business. Qualcomm's revenue model is based on patent licensing across the entire industry; Huawei's rise in handset volume actually increased Qualcomm's licensing revenue, since Huawei paid Qualcomm royalties on every handset sold (they signed a patent license agreement in 2018). Qualcomm had financial incentive for Huawei to sell more phones, not fewer.
On "they knew about Iran for years":
You concede the Iran dealings are "probably based on true facts" but argue the timing was convenient. The actual timeline: HSBC's internal probe of the Huawei-Iran transactions began in late 2016, the DOJ investigation built on HSBC's disclosures throughout 2017-2018, and the arrest warrant was issued in August 2018 [5][6]. Criminal investigations of this complexity involving international banking, foreign defendants, and extradition treaties routinely take years. The idea that prosecutors had a ready-made case sitting in a drawer and deployed it at an opportune moment isn't how federal criminal prosecution works. Grand jury proceedings, evidence gathering, and extradition requests have their own institutional momentum and timeline.
Also: "USA has also made deals with Iran and they have not sanctioned themselves" is a non-sequitur. The sanctions against Huawei aren't for "dealing with Iran" in the abstract, they're for bank fraud, i.e., lying to HSBC about the nature of transactions to evade sanctions that were in force at the time. The US government conducting foreign policy with Iran through official channels is categorically different from a private company deceiving banks to circumvent sanctions law.
On YMTC's projected dominance:
You say there were "published prognoses" for YMTC's rapid growth. I don't doubt that bullish analyst projections existed. But even the most optimistic 2022 forecasts projected YMTC reaching perhaps 8-10% of NAND by 2025 [7], which is roughly what actually happened despite the sanctions [8]. "Dominant position" means something like Samsung's 35%. Single-digit-to-low-double-digit share, even at aggressive prices, is "credible new entrant," not "dominant position."
On Apple: You say Apple dropping YMTC before the Entity List "doesn't prove anything, except that Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome." This is unfalsifiable. If Apple dropped them after sanctions: "they were forced to." If Apple dropped them before: "they had inside knowledge." What evidence would you accept that Apple made an independent commercial/reputational risk decision?
On memory prices:
I actually think you have the kernel of a legitimate argument here, and I should have engaged with it more carefully. You're right that the memory market is a tight oligopoly with a documented history of anticompetitive behavior: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have literally pled guilty to DRAM price fixing, paying $731 million in criminal fines in the 2000s, and faced renewed price-fixing allegations in 2018 [9]. More vendors would structurally improve this market.
But the distance between "more vendors would be good for competition" and "US sanctions on YMTC caused the current price crisis" remains enormous. Even in your restated version, the counterfactual requires YMTC to have grown large enough by 2024-2025 to serve as a meaningful alternative when Samsung/SK Hynix pivoted to HBM. Given that YMTC actually did reach ~10-13% NAND share by late 2025 even under sanctions [8], and prices still spiked, the evidence suggests the HBM reallocation would have overwhelmed any competitive pressure from a mid-sized Chinese entrant. The structural problem is that three companies control >90% of DRAM, and YMTC doesn't make DRAM at all, they make NAND. CXMT's DRAM operation is far smaller and wasn't even targeted by the same sanctions.
The memory price crisis is real, the oligopoly is real, and more competition would help. But attributing the current crisis primarily to sanctions rather than to AI-driven demand reallocation and the inherent fragility of a 3-player oligopoly (which existed long before any Chinese entrant) conflates a contributing factor with the primary cause.
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_announces_the_kirin_980-news...
[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/05/21/2019-10...
[3] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/snapdragon-855-benchmarks,news-...
[4] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/30/21114885/huawei-overtakes...
[5] https://thefinanser.com/2021/06/usa-v-china-or-huawei-v-hsbc...
[6] https://www.cbc.ca/news/meng-wanzhou-huawei-kovrig-spavor-1....
[7] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/2022-nand-process-tech...
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1q3qln3/ymtc_rock...
I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.
But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.
That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has if anything pulled them further away from that path. Things like the great firewall have helped him in that effort.
We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.
Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.
And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.
No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal.
You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.)
You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.)
You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.)
You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert).
Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days.
But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.
The Irish Potato Famine alone killed 15% of Ireland vs the GLF killing 5% of China.
That's not a reason not to plan 5 years in advance... is it? Any more than the Potato Famine is a reason we should't have capitalism.
I can't say that I've ever heard the argument that a plan led to a famine therefore we should never make plans, when we have great counterexamples that not planning also led to famine. Feels like learning the wrong lesson here.
[edit] I also think it's worth pointing out that America's response to the Dust Bowl was the Farm Bill, which it could be argued is one of the largest-scale examples of central planning in history. It continues to this day, and is part of the reason Americans pay less as a share of their spending on food than any other country on earth.
People say everyone remembers the hits, nobody remembers the misses - but that is the opposite of true for government. Everyone remembers the misses, nobody thinks twice about the hits.
Then the disease hit.
There's a reason there was persistent Chinese famines before GLF, and none after, because early industrial policies sorted out land resource management via massive rural mobilization/infra/industrial efforts, i.e. why PRC industrialization % and lifespan was vastly higher than developing peers in 70s... that's all because GLF broadly worked, adding about cumulative 200 milliion lives in terms of extended lifespan and likely ~100m+ in terms of averted famine deaths. Most historically competent Chinese leadership is return to farseeing utilitarianism, willing to trade lives for progress, which always sucks for the people during time of upheaval, but ultimately net good.